Ice and fire

In my quest to smell the roses even if I don't time to stop, I have enjoyed the last two evenings right in my neighborhood, spending my time in doing something that brings me joy. The "Parampara" series of dance shows, featuring internationally acclaimed troupes is performing at Shilpa Kala Vedika, the wonderful auditorium located right next to Shilparamam in Hitec City. We have the opportunity to watch fantastic dance productions for free, right here in Hyderabad!

Yesterday was the Moscow Classical Ballet troupe that mesmerized the audience with their graceful performance. It was my first time watching live ballet and it was an out-of-this-world experience. The soothing strains of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake filled the half-empty hall with the smooth, fluid movements of the artistes. The petite ballerinas in their gossamer outfits glided across the stage like dainty fairies and comets while performing lifts and twirling on tiptoes for moments that seemed to go on forever. They almost did not look like discrete human figures, but resembled the soft, gentle strokes of a painter's brush, floating across the canvas of the stage. The emotions displayed were universal and felt collectively by the audience as they continued to impress with their finesse.

This evening I was once again fortunate to attend another spectacular performance by Flamenco dancers from Spain. In contrast to the icy elegance of the ballet, this Andalusian dance form had all the fiery passion that Spain is famous for. Jose Parcel was superb as he performed solo footwork that was mind-blowing. The dumbstruck audience responded to his performance with thunderous applause and whistles. The live musicians sang soulful ballads and rousing numbers which in turn energized the dancers who seemed tireless as they stomped around with their flouncy long gowns, their furious footwork a source of intense fascination. I watched unblinking, totally captivated by their grace, their controlled passion and their love of this wonderful energetic dance form.

I was reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's central premise in his book "Outliers" that those who perform exceedingly well at any given task, have at least 10,000 hours of work behind them. While this is apparent in sports, nowhere is it a greater delight to watch, than in the arena of performing arts. Each of these artists have put in thousands of hours of practice in their pursuit of perfection. In the presence of such dedication, all that one can do, is feel humbled, and grateful to be a witness.

Love, my friend, is not Easy - Book Review

There are books that you like instantly, some that grow on you and some that you dislike so much that you can barely read it. This book does not fit in these categories. The short version of the review - the book is totally pathetic.

Perhaps the acknowledgments in the front of the book should have given me a hint. It is basically a story written in a blog, in bits and pieces, over a period of time. The book, in its final finished form reads like a blog, not like a novel. The story is cliched, not copied from one known story or movie, but from many movies. Aditi, the main character, having to grow up all to soon after the sudden death of her father, seems competent to manage the lives of her family members but totally incapable of having either a stable thought or logic while managing her own. She is supposed to be a finance whiz-kid but cursed with the absolute worst luck, two great guys wooing her simultaneously. And how much better can it get, when she is pregnant with one's child that the oher marries her, a la Amitabh in Silsila. But there is no great drama with a love triangle involving another woman here but just poor sucker number one who runs off after finding out that his life is limited, like Rajesh Khanna in Anand.

The grammar is poor, the prose is pedestrian. There is no sign of an editor anywhere in the vicinity with sentences like this "I had always been a thinking person if not not a thoughtful one, and the buzz in my mind has spiralled to an all time high crescendo. I plunged into work even more deeply than ever before." The story-line is jerky, the narrative simultaneously exists in past, present and future tense. There is no depth to the writing, no insights, no takeaways. It is an example of how low chick-lit can go.

There is one thing that this book makes me want to do - read Chetan Bhagat!
I can't help but end this review by saying, "Reading this book my friend, is stupid. Don't do it".

3, Zakia Mansion - Book Review

Sometimes I go on a binge - I read all the books written by an author. While it is great to keep reading someone who writes well, it is difficult to evaluate the different books in an unbiased manner. Sometimes the characters look familiar, even identical to characters of other books, the situations seem all to similar and the dialogue can sound repetitive. But this time, I was pleasantly surprised.

I picked up Gouri Dange's first novel, 3, Zakia Mansion, after reading her more recent "The Counsel of Strangers". It is a brief novel, hardly 160 pages or so but tells the story of Shaheen Adamji, born as the oldest child of the Karimali family living at 3, Zakia Manion, in a household made up of parents, two siblings, an orphaned cousin and a loving grandmother. The story begins with 14 year old Shaheen and appears to be a coming-of-age novel at first. The level of details in the narrative are just enough to illuminate the everyday events of a family that had seen better days while continuing to live in an ordinary life in a city.

The story takes a unexpected turn with the arrival of a cousin from Junagadh, a turn that breaks apart their humdrum existence and plummets all the three children into a dismal spiral. Shaheen is the first to escape, by marrying Ayaz, a Mama's boy, who is unable to balance the two women in his life, a state that does not improve even after the arrival of another female, his daughter, Juhi. Shaheen's siblings, Ayesha and Farhan suffer longer at Zakia Mansion and head towards their own private hells. Ehsaan, the cousin who grows up with them, flies off to America and is relatively spared the sad details of those he holds so dear.

A large part of the novel deals with spunky Shaheen's life as she weathers the storms and one day finds herself a divorced woman without custody of her teenage daughter. Dange has done a fabulous job of capturing the thoughts and the nuances of teenagers, whether it is Shaheen's feelings or the more vicious sentiments of Juhi towards her parents. The story meanders along for a brief while until Manas, a young man, appears in her life. From this point till the end of the novel, the story keeps you riveted with the brisk storytelling style that moves the plot forward without sacrificing deeper insights into the various characters as they learn to take risks and enjoy what life brings them.

There is no comparison with the later novel that Dange wrote, the originality is refreshing, as is the writing. This novel, is a great read, with characters that are real people who we all know, characters that show us that life, after all, is worth living, even as it pulls you in myriad directions.

Das Auto

Here are pictures of my new car - my first automobile.
Das Auto. The Car. Mine!

Employees First, Customers Second - Book Review

I chose to read this book which I first noticed in the "Management" section of the airport bookstore. I usually stay away from the MBA type books because, as all true scientists, I find it a little too esoteric for my taste. But the title intrigued me because conventional MBA philosophy advocates the opposite; "customer is king" is the mantra that is sold under different labels. It seemed a little contrary to my usual bias and I was curious to see what was inside.

Vineet Nayar, the author, took charge as CEO of HCL Technologies in 2005, at a time when the company was doing quite well in its stable position among the major IT rivals. Five years later, the company is one of the fastest growing companies which tripled its revenues, halved its attrition rate and grew its customer-base five-fold. All this in a period marked by one of the most severe recessions in recent history. The book provides the blueprint for this transformation.

In retrospect, a clear formula emerged for this radical transformation which included phases such as Mirror, Mirror; Trust through transparency; Inverting the pyramid and Recasting the role of the CEO. But the journey to transform a large, profitable company into a dynamic, forward-looking organization required a lot of courage and faith in its employees. Nayar shows through his simple narration, how it is possible to come up with totally new strategies that are focused on employees who are in the so-called "value-zone", the critical interface with clients.

With several initiatives with catchy titles such as Smart Service Desk, U&I,employee first councils and a revolutionary way of implementing 360 degree feedback, change of a unprecedented magnitude was enabled in a company with 55000 employees. With employees fully engaged and trusting, it is no wonder that HCLT is hurtling towards even greater heights.

Personally, it took me while to complete this book, but I also did not want to read it only half-way. As a former disgruntled employee of large corporations where I felt the greatest threat was in disengagement, the first symptom of further failure, I knew how little the management cares or can do about this. This book points to one option of how turning the entire management philosophy upside down, can work wonders.

For all you cynical workers and managers, here is book that shows another way.

The Counsel of Strangers - Book Review

As the title suggests, this is a novel about strangers, 6 strangers of all ages, occupations and social class, who happen to meet at a wedding. It is not so much a novel as a collection of six short stories that merge one fateful night. The night where wedding revelry is only a backdrop to these guests who find themselves reluctant invitees to the pomp and show. Instead these characters spend the evening in each others company, divulging their past lives and current predicaments.

On the surface, the characters appear unique and quite different from each other. Wing Commander Brahme, a retired Army Officer, Kartik, the young teenage boy, Anandi-Mohini, a single woman with a past, Sahil, the news reporter, Sajani the nurse and Professor Natrajan. Their stories cover different aspects of the human condition, from dealing with late-life romance, to lack thereof, from being alone to being watched continuously, seeking meaning to seeking affection. But there are common threads that repeat, the USA connection for three of the 6 characters, the Mumbai connection for another three.

Dange does a fantastic job of getting the thoughts of the aging and elderly just right but falters with the first person narration of the little boy who resents being under the microscope of his family, afraid to repeat the delinquency of their older child. Nurse Sajani's voice is much more believable as a woman who has spent her years caring for other bodies, but craves to be free from her duties as she ages alone. The lines spoken by the educated elite ring true and is the voice that the author seems most comfortable with, whether it is the moral superiority expressed by the NRIs settled in the US or the intellectual snobbery of Professor Natrajan who uses it as a shield to distance herself from her only son.

The stories are laced with wry humor and true-to-life situations. I loved the first chapter about Wing Commander Brahme and identified with Anandi-Mohini's theories about marriage. The writing is liberally sprinkled with quotes from Ezra Pound and lyrics of well-known Bollywood songs. It is a light and engaging read, particularly a good book to while away the time in airports and train journeys.

The technique of telling many different stories in first person narration as chapters in a novel is not new one, it has been successfully used by other Indian authors such as Anita Nair in Ladies Coupe and more recently by Chitra Banerjee in One Amazing Thing. But this is one novel where the oft-repeated lines from Bollywood movies also undermine the story by the obvious effort and insistence on trying to tie things up nicely at the end.

The novels strength is in its life-like characters but they turn into mere caricatures as they sprint to the anticipated happy ending.

Devotion to music

As I was immersed in reading "The Music Room", the legendary singer of the Kirana gharana, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, lay in the ICU in a hospital in Pune, battling for life. News of the death of this Bharat Ratna, appeared in the newspapers yesterday, along with praise for his musical genius. Obituaries spoke good things about all he had accomplished in the 88 years, almost all of them devoted to his passion for music, a passion that was discerned at an early age.

The young Bhimsen ran away from home to find his guru, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, the maestro of the Kirana gharana. He studied in the strict confines of the guru-shishya tradition but always strived to enrich the tradition by bringing in innovation and the best of other repertoires. One article quoted Bhimsen Joshi's remark "What one learns from one's guru has to be supplemented by individual genius or else one will not have anything worthwhile to say. In fact, a good disciple should not be a second rate imitator but a first rate improvement of his teacher."

When I watch some of the talent shows on TV, the whole charade seems meaningless, as each aspiring singer tries to imitate the style and sensibility of a recorded and played innumerable times until the original flavor has become a package that can be swallowed. Imitation is the best for form of not just flattery but is also the ticket to fame and its rewards.

It is difficult to imagine the context of a lifetime of complete education from a guru in these times where quick recipes for instant success is what sells. Whether it is talented youngsters with ambitious parents or audiences with short attention span, neither the student or teacher has what it takes to either seek or be guided towards developing individual from a holistic perspective. Talent may be God-given, but what the person does with this gift is surely molded by those who come into his life to bring balance and guide him towards wisdom.

Let us take a moment to reflect on the passing on of a great musician and hope for seeing such greatness in every generation.